Dead Even

by Emma Brookes

Overview

The scars on her wrists, throat and chest told the story. Somehow Audra Delaney had survived, but with her memory of her attacker shattered. Then the unthinkable happens; she hears his voice on the radio, and now all she lives for are dark dreams of revenge.

She was his one loose end--the only one who got away, the only one who can still destroy him. All he has to do is find out her name, so he can silence her forever.

Soon, they're racing neck-and-neck, stalking each other in a world of shadows and evil, where it will take all of Audra's strength and the unexpected ingenuity of a child genius to survive, in Dead Even by Emma Brookes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466885363
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/18/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	289
File size:	323 KB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Emma Brookes is the author of Dead Even.

Emma Brookes is the author of Dead Even and Face Off.

Read an Excerpt

Dead Even

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By Emma Brookes

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1996 Gladys Wellbrock
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8536-3

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CHAPTER 1

Audra felt the needle stab into her arm, followed by a slight tingling sensation as blood was drawn up into the vial the nurse held. When it was full, Nurse Dechant changed vials and started Audra's blood flowing into the new one. Ten seconds later she deftly removed the needle, placed cotton over the small puncture wound and undid the rubber strap from Audra's upper arm. The entire procedure had taken all of two minutes.

"There now, Audra," she said. "That should do it. We'll have the results back Monday."

Audra rolled down the sleeve of her blouse and concentrated on the buttons at the cuff. The last step. She could almost hear Hazel Alden's nasal voice. "My dears, I know it isn't the law anymore, but with all—you know—the dangers involved, I can't imagine you would be thinking of marriage without a blood test!" Audra's eyes had flown to Gerald. Surely he hadn't told his mother about—

Well, it was over now, anyway. Gerald would be in later today for his test, then all that was left to do was to get the license.

The time was flying by. When they had set February twelfth as their wedding date, the five months had seemed an eternity to wait. Now, it was only three weeks away.

Audra wanted it to be over. The large formal wedding had never been her wish anyway. It was Gerald who had insisted they "do it up right." Gerald and his mother—planning; making exhaustive lists; telling her what flowers she must carry; choosing her jewelry.

She would have preferred a small wedding, with only their closest friends and family, or even just the two of them going to the courthouse, but Gerald had been adamant. And Gerald usually gets his own way. She immediately felt guilty for the thought. She leaned heavily on Gerald's strength and decisiveness. She could hardly fault him for it.

"So you've got yourself a young man, Audra," Doc Jacobson had said to her when she came in for her routine physical a few months earlier. "Does he appreciate what a fine young woman he's getting?"

"I think so, Doc," she had answered. "At least he knows all about—about these," she had pointed to the ugly scars crisscrossing her rib cage and abdomen. "It doesn't seem to bother him any."

"No reason why it should, Audra," he had said pointedly. "No reason at all."

She crossed the waiting room and gathered up the belongings she had stashed on a chair, then handed Nurse Dechant her Blue Cross card. She was positive the deductible had not been used up as yet, but this way the office would bill her later and the payment could come out of next month's paycheck.

Getting ready for this wedding had been much more costly than she had planned. Without her parents to help pick up the tab, she and Gerald were struggling, splitting everything right down the middle, even the cost of her wedding gown. Again she felt a twinge of anger at the burden it was placing on them. Five hundred guests. And she knew maybe twenty of them! Then there was the reception, the dinner, the dance. The cost kept spiraling upward, along with her anxiety. She wasn't comfortable in crowds, and meeting new people was always hard for her. Had been ever since ... Well, there was nothing to do but steel herself and get through it, for Gerald's sake. She couldn't imagine what had possessed her fiancé, anyway. He was always so frugal—cheap? —in other matters.

And Bess, bless her heart, telling her she would pay for the wedding! The old woman could barely keep afloat as it was! Gerald would really have a fit if he ever found out about the special savings she put aside each month for Bess. But it was only fair. Bess Truman had certainly helped her out over the years!

Nurse Dechant pushed the insurance card toward her. "There you go, Audra. If I don't see you Monday, I'll see you at the wedding. I've even bought a new dress just for the big event. Doc and I were both so pleased you invited us."

Audra impulsively reached across the counter, placing her hand on the arm of the old nurse who was at least ten years past retirement age. "I'm so glad you're coming." She didn't add that the two of them were among the handful of guests she would know personally.

Audra glanced at her watch as she left the small clinic. It was only a little past eight. Good. Because of the blood test, she had had nothing to eat since six yesterday evening, and she was famished. She would just have time to swing by McDonald's for some breakfast.

Stepping out into the sunlight her eyes fell on a building across the street. It was a business office, but the discolored limestone of the building's exterior was typical of the buildings in the old Hays City of pioneer days.

She smiled as she thought of her adopted "hometown." Like so many other frontier towns that had evolved into modern towns and cities, there was a kind of schizophrenia to it—as if the town couldn't really decide whether it was a frontier cow town or a modern city. The downtown area had ancient limestone buildings and brick streets interspersed with new buildings with shiny exteriors. Gas lights and neon.

As her friend Bess had once commented, "Honey, Hays is like the little old farm girl who comes to town. She puts on lipstick and curls her hair, but underneath the paint she's still the little old farm gal with manure on her boots."

Well, schizophrenic or not, it was now her hometown and she loved it. She had a sense of belonging.

In the parking lot Audra unlocked her eight-year-old Datsun, automatically glancing in the back seat before entering the car. For some reason she always felt safer in the early mornings, but still she was careful.

It was a bitterly cold January morning, and the motor made a few deep groans of protest before grudgingly coming to life. Audra rubbed her bare hands together as she waited for the car to warm, then reached over and turned on the radio, contented to hear "Party Line," a local show where people called in with items to buy or sell. Perfect. Maybe she would get lucky. There were so many items she and Gerald needed for the unfurnished duplex they had leased. And with all the money we're wasting on this wedding, we have to really watch it. She stopped, aware she was beginning to sound petty, even to herself.

Pulling out of the parking lot, she turned west. Traffic was beginning to pick up, but even on a busy day it was light compared to larger cities. Audra liked the fact that she could get anywhere she wanted to go in less than fifteen minutes. She reached Vine Street, one of the main thoroughfares, turned north and headed out toward McDonald's, half listening to the radio and mentally going over the opening activities for her kindergarten class. It was going to be a busy morning. Pictures. A visit to Sternburg Museum.

She listened as one caller offered free kittens, and another had a brass bed for sale. Then the radio announcer took another call. "Good morning. This is Party Line. Go ahead, please."

The caller started to speak. "I'm looking for a small accent table—" The deep, raspy voice coming from the radio was drowned out by Audra's scream as her hands froze on the steering wheel. She recognized the horrible voice instantly. God, no! It's him!

She was vaguely aware of a horn honking frantically and realized she was drifting over into the left lane of traffic. She jerked her Datsun back hard to the right and pulled off the well-traveled road into the parking lot of one of the many discount stores lining the highway.

He was still on the phone, and she fumbled for the knob to increase the volume. The raspy voice blared out at her. There was no question in her mind. It was him. She had heard that voice in her nightmares for ten agonizing years. Blood left her face, her stomach turned, and her hands began to tremble uncontrollably. God. After all this time. How could it be? She opened the car door and hung her head out to get more air. She could almost feel his rough hands on her body once again—feel the pain of the knife going into her repeatedly when he was finished with her.

"Oh, no. Oh God, no. Please," she whispered the words aloud. The same words she had said to him so long ago. But they hadn't stopped him. Nothing had stopped him during the five hours he held her.

She had been seventeen years old, and just beginning her second semester of college at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. It was the first day of enrollment, a Wednesday, and she was leaving the library to do a five-mile run before returning to her dorm for dinner. The sun was just setting, bouncing off the hoods of the hundred or so cars in the parking lot. There was nothing to warn her of the nightmare to come; nothing to prepare her for the massive destruction, both to her body and mind, that lay ahead. Even now, ten years later, all she could remember with clarity about that day was the effect of sun glinting off the cars as she cut through the parking lot, heading toward her normal running route. From that point on, her recollections were hazy, laced with bits and fragments she had picked up from listening to the people around her, as she floated in and out of consciousness in the hospital. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish a true memory from what she had heard, or was told, about the incident.

The incident. How bizarre to refer to something that ripped out your insides, both literally and figuratively, as the incident.

"And what time did you leave the library the night of the incident, Miss Delaney?"

"Could you tell us what happened to the clothing you were wearing the night of the incident, Miss Delaney?"

The incident. The incident that had left her partially paralyzed for months; the incident that had precipitated her father's heart attack, leaving her alone to face her fears; the incident that had made her terrified of relationships, cringing in agony at the slightest sign of a sexual overture; the incident that still brought on unexpected panic attacks and odious nightmares.

And the voice. Always the voice. She had awakened over and over those first months, screaming about the voice. She could not rid her memory of that low-pitched, guttural, noise. She had tried to explain it to the police. "It—It sounded sort of like when a person starts to talk, and they have a frog in their throat. Only his—his voice was that way all the time—like it was hard for him to speak."

"What did he say to you?" they had asked her.

"I—I don't remember," she had answered.

"You were with him for over five hours. Can't you remember anything at all he said to you?"

She had covered her ears with her hands and screamed at them. "No! No, I can't remember. Please don't make me remember! Get out! Get out! I don't want to talk to you any more!"

Finally, they had let her alone.

Did she have the strength to go through it all again? The questions. The looks. The newspaper accounts. She wasn't seventeen now—there would be no keeping her name out of print this time. Should she go to the police? If she did, everyone would know.

Audra put her head down on the steering wheel of her car. How could she even be considering not going to the police? Of course she would go. She couldn't let that bastard get away with what he had done to her. She would just give the police her information, and they could take it from there.

What information? It suddenly dawned on Audra she knew nothing about the caller. What would she say to the police? Someone called in to Party Line and, yes, sir, I know he is a rapist and would-be murderer? No, sir, I don't know which caller it was. No, I don't remember what he was selling.

Audra clinched the steering wheel tightly in her hands. Think, damnit!

If she could only remember more of what happened that night so long ago, but it was buried deep within her subconscious, and nothing she had tried would jar it loose. She could vaguely remember the rape, like a fuzzy dream, and begging with the man to stop. She could remember the knife held against her throat, and then plunged into her when he was finished. She even had a hazy recollection of pulling herself out of the ravine when she heard music blaring from a parked car a few minutes later. The two teenagers who finally noticed her saved her life that night. They had stripped off parts of their own clothing, bound her naked body as best they could to stem the flow of blood, and raced for the hospital. Dimly, she could even remember hearing a nurse comment that she would never make it—not with the amount of blood she had lost, and the way she was torn up inside.

Those things she could remember, but nothing else. The face of her attacker was locked up somewhere in her mind and she had never been able to release it. The detective assigned to her case had tried everything, to no avail. She had been held for over five hours, but could not remember a single word the man said to her. She had not been able to give the police one concrete piece of information, except for her description of the man's voice.

Why? Why couldn't she bring it forward? Even under hypnosis, she would reach a certain point, then begin screaming and have to be brought out of the hypnotic state. She had been in therapy for three years after the attack, an emotional wreck who could not handle even the most simple of tasks. Finally one day, she packed up her meager belongings in her father's antiquated Ford station wagon that she had inherited, and headed west on I-70. Audra hadn't the slightest idea where she was going, but knew only that she needed to get out of the city that held so many bad memories for her.

The old Ford had lasted only about three hours, and coughed out its death rale just as she was approaching Hays, Kansas. She walked the half-mile into town, and had been there ever since.

Hays had been good to her. When she trudged into town that night, with only eighty dollars to her name, she had plunked down half of it for a week's lodging at the Rock Road Inn—a small, privately owned motel right off of the interstate that had been built in the early forties. Most of its tenants were down on their luck, low on money, and in need of the cheapest lodging they could find.

That first night, Audra had bolted her door, pushed the dresser over in front of it, and cried herself to sleep. She was twenty years old, broke, alone in a strange town, and she felt there wasn't a person on earth who cared if she lived or died.

The next morning she showered, dressed, and went to the small office to ask where the employment agency was located. The thin, wrinkled lady sitting on a stool behind the desk had looked her up and down before answering. "If you're willing to work, I could use some help around here." And with those words, Bess Truman entered her life. "And, no, before you ask, I ain't no relation." Bess had smiled a toothless grin at her. "If I'd knowed marrying my Billy would of caused me so much aggravation, I might've thought twice," she had winked broadly at Audra. "We always did say it was just a good thing his momma didn't name him Harry."

For some reason, Bess Truman was exactly what Audra needed at that particular juncture in her life. Bess chain-smoked, talked nonstop, gummed her food when she would finally remember to eat, and sipped on diet Coke all day, occasionally lacing it with rum. But she worked hard, had a heart of gold, and seemed to know everyone in town.

By the end of the first month, she had moved Audra into her small house located on the west side of the motel. "There's just no reason you stayin' at the motel, not with me havin' all this room over here. Besides, you know how I like to talk—why, you'll be doin' me a favor."

It was six months before Audra told Bess about the attack. Bess had listened, silent, while Audra poured out all of her frustration and fears, then gave her better advice than all the psychiatrists she had seen. "Well, child, I say screw that son of a bitch all to hell." Audra had looked at her blankly for a moment, then burst out laughing. "You're absolutely right, Bess. Screw that son of a bitch all to hell!" It was the first time she could remember laughing in three years.

It hadn't been easy, but gradually she had put the incident behind her. Though it was always there, lurking in her memory, she got on with her life. When she had confided to Bess that she had planned to become a teacher but now thought it impossible, Bess had chided her gently. "Ain't nothin' impossible, Audra. We have a fine university here in town—one of the best teachers' colleges in the state, or so I've heard. They got lots of ways to help kids like you—scholarships—grants—student loans. Ain't no reason you can't go back to school."

Audra would most likely have let the whole idea drop there, but Bess had been persistent and immediately began making plans. "I know the dean and a few others at the college, even the president. I'll just run up there this afternoon and see what can be worked out."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dead Even by Emma Brookes. Copyright © 1996 Gladys Wellbrock. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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